Docker may be a powerful tool, but its command line interface can be daunting for all but for the most avid system administrators. We thought of our target audience for the Autoize™ Marketing Automation Infrastructure for agencies, and wanted to build a tool that agencies could easily use to provide a hosted platform to their end clients.
As open source software that users install in their own environment, one of the biggest barriers to implementing Mautic marketing automation for clients has always been the technical configuration. An incorrect server config, permissions issue, missing PHP module, or a wayward cron job could leave administrators with hours or days of difficult and time-consuming troubleshooting.
Owing to these misconfigurations, it led to the perception that adopting Mautic for marketing automation required a highly technical background. The Autoize™ solution simplifies and standardizes the deployment of Mautic through a Docker architecture, master container image that comes pre-configured, and a graphical admin backend that marketers can use to create & manage their client instances.
The admin panel is powered by Portainer, the most popular GUI dashboard for managing Docker hosts and Swarm clusters. Portainer provides a “single pane of glass” for agency administrators to monitor which marketing automation instances reside on which Docker hosts in their swarm, manage their lifecycle, and exec into a container’s shell for troubleshooting if needed. In just a few clicks, new containerized Mautic instances can be launched by using a provided stack template.
Portainer visualizes the nodes in your cluster and shows you which containers are running healthily, and which ones might need to be rebooted. If you notice that a container is using too large of a proportion of a node’s resources, you can configure Docker resource limits to avoid “noisy neighbor” issues with other instances.
Portainer supports issuing separate accounts with user or administrator roles for all of the members of your agency’s team responsible for administering Mautic instances. Users have limited privileges, and only have access to the resources that are delegated to them by an administrator. Administrators are superusers with global permissions to access all resources.
The super admin dashboard is available across all of our packages. It is one of the most powerful solutions out there for managing multiple Mautic instances. Our Starter and Business packages aimed at smaller agencies starting out are based on a single Docker host or node. Even so, you can access all the features that Portainer supports with a single node swarm. For additional capacity & redundancy, this can be later extended to a larger swarm by stepping up to our Professional or Enterprise packages with three Docker hosts or more.
